Traits

A trait is an item that defines a set of contracts or shared behavior that types can opt to implement. Traits are not usable by themselves and are meant to be implemented by types. Traits have the power to establish relationships between distinct types. They are the backbone to many language features such as closures, operators, smart pointers, loops, compile-time data race checks, and much more. Quite a few of the high-level language features in Rust boil down to some type calling a trait method that it implements. With that said, let's look at how we can define and use a trait in Rust!

Let's say we are modeling a simple media player application that can play audio and video files. For this demo, we'll create a project by running ...

Get Mastering Rust - Second Edition now with O’Reilly online learning.